Tag: Visual Studio Package

In this article, I’ll explain how one can customize the basic VisualStudio Isolated shell application and add a custom extension to the shellapplication.

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Introduction

This article is in continuation of “Creating your first visual studio VSIX package” article of the series Visual Studio Extensibility. The first part focused on creating a Visual Studio Extension to locate a file or folder in Windows Explorer, the second part was more about deploying the Visual Studio extension to staging server via continuous integration. This article will illustrate how to add or embed the visual studio extension or visual studio package into a Visual Studio Isolated Shell application. Visual Studio provides the flexibility to create our own IDE or a Visual Studio kind of product altogether having custom extensions or some pre-defined functionalities of visual studio. Therefore one can get their custom Visual Studio as a product which could be sold in the market.

This article is the continuation of “Creating your first visual studio VSIX package” article of the series Visual Studio Extensibility. The first part focused on creating a Visual Studio extension to locate a file or folder in Windows Explorer. This article will illustrate how to make your Visual Studio extension deployment ready, i.e. how to deploy the extension to Staging Server via GIT and publish the extension on Visual Studio market place to make it available to the public.

In this three article series of Visual Studio Extensibility we’ll learn how to create a new Visual Studio package, deploy that on staging server and GIT via continuous integration setup and at the end create a Visual Studio isolated Shell application with that embedded package. Although this is very rare topic and you could not find enough study material on this topic over the web that explains how to work with it step by step. MSDN contains good content but very generic, and to the point. In my article I’ll try to explain each and every small part step by step, so that one can learn while coding.

Introduction

Visual Studio Extensibility features are not new in .NET. It’s just that they are not very commonly used which to me is a surprise because Visual Studio extensibility features are so powerful they give a new definition to customization. Customization of your IDE, customization of the desired features that every developer would love to have and even customizations on the IDE that could eventually result in a whole new product altogether (for example, a custom Visual Studio with one’s own extensions and features).